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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/47-2020-paulo-freire-and-south-africa/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/47-2020-paulo-freire-and-south-africa/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">It Is Freedom, Only Freedom Which Can Quench Our Thirst: The Forty-Seventh Newsletter (2020).</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">November 19, 2020 - Vijay Prashad<br></div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_31673" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Dossier-34-Cover.jpg" alt="Cover of dossier 34: Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="233"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-31673" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Cover of dossier 34: <i>Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa</i></span></p></div>
<p>Dear friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>In 2011, the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell travelled to India to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x183ZsMol0c">deliver</a>
the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Lecture in New Delhi. Mankell recounted an
incident from Mozambique, where he lived for part of each year. In the
1980s, after Mozambique won its independence from Portugal in 1974, the
South African apartheid regime and the settler-colonial army of Rhodesia
backed an anti-communist faction against the government of the
Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO). The point of the war was to
destroy the bases of the South African and Zimbabwean national
liberation forces that had been given permission to operate by
Mozambique’s FRELIMO government.</p>
<p>The war imposed on Mozambique was brutal, the destruction immense.
Mankell visited a border region, where the invading troops and their
anti-communist allies had burnt down villages. He was walking on a path
towards a village. He saw a young man coming towards him, a thin man in
ragged clothes. As he came close, Mankell saw his feet. ‘He had in his
deep misery’, Mankell told his Delhi audience, ‘painted shoes on his
feet. In a way, to defend his dignity when everything was lost, he had
found the colours from the earth, from herbs, and he had painted shoes
on his feet’.</p>
<p>For Mankell, this man’s act was a form of resistance against the
fading light of hope; although this man could very well have been on the
way to a meeting of his FRELIMO branch, where they would discuss the
current situation of their struggle and plan to defend their land. In
1981, when South Africa attacked Mozambique, President Samora Machel of
FRELIMO embraced Oliver Tambo of South Africa’s African National
Congress (ANC) at a public rally in Maputo’s Independence Square and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dnOIJThvRssC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">said</a>,
‘We don’t want war. We are peacemakers because we are socialists. One
side wants peace, and the other wants war. What do we do? We let South
Africa choose. We are not afraid of war’. These might have been the
words that rang in the ears of the man that Mankell had seen.</p>
<p>During the national liberation struggle, Machel had said that the
revolutionary process was not only about victory over the Portuguese —
or the South African apartheid state or the Rhodesian settler-colonial
state — but it was about the ‘creation of a new human, with a new
mentality’. It was that struggle against colonialism that produced a
society where people were proud, even if they did not, as yet, have
necessary goods, such as shoes.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_31683" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/The-Frantz-Fanon-Political-School-at-the-eKhenana-Land-Occupation-of-Abahlali-baseMjondolo-Cato-Manor-Durban-South-Africa.-14-October-2020_Richard-Pithouse-868x1024.jpg" alt="Richard Pithouse, The Frantz Fanon Political School at the eKhenana Land Occupation of Abahlali baseMjondolo, Cato Manor, Durban, South Africa, 2020." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="376" height="443"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-31683" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Richard
Pithouse, The Frantz Fanon Political School at the eKhenana Land
Occupation of Abahlali baseMjondolo, Cato Manor, Durban, South Africa,
2020.</span></p></div>
<p>The struggle for dignity is elemental, and it formed a core part of
the ideology of national liberation. This was the premise of the work of
two thinkers — Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire — whose writings emerged
out of the national liberation and socialist traditions, which impacted
those struggles in turn. It is no surprise that our Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research office in Johannesburg (South Africa) has
produced two dossiers on these two important figures: <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-26-fanon/"><i>Frantz Fanon: The Brightness of Metal</i></a> in March 2020, and now <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-34-paulo-freire-and-south-africa/"><i>Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa</i></a> in November 2020. Part of our work in the Institute is <i>to go back to go forward</i>;
to return to the sources of our tradition, study them carefully for
their important lessons, and then draw from them in order to advance our
struggles in the present. Both Fanon and Freire — the latter influenced
by the former’s <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i> (1961) as he drafted his classic <i>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</i>
(1968) — emphasised the importance of collective study and struggle as
the lever to develop a critical consciousness amongst the masses. Their
general orientation towards the integral relationship between collective
study and struggle informs our own approach in the Institute, as we
laid out in our dossier <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/the-new-intellectual/"><i>The New Intellectual</i></a> in February 2019.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_31653" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Book-covers-of-Pedagogy-of-the-Oppressed-in-different-languages.jpg" alt="Book covers of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in different languages." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="315"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-31653" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Book covers of <i>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</i> in different languages.</span></p></div>
<p>Freire’s <i>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</i> was written while the
Brazilian intellectual was in exile in Chile, where he had fled after
having spent seventy days in a Brazilian prison during the early days of
the US-backed military coup of 1964. For the book, Freire drew not only
from his own experience in the struggles in Brazil, but also from what
he had read about the Algerian liberation movement (via Fanon) and from
his engagement with the national liberation movements in
Portuguese-colonised parts of Africa.</p>
<p>The oppressed, Freire wrote, did not want knowledge for its own sake;
they expressed a range of desires for the world, including to create a
world where they could live with dignity, including with shoes. Freire
quotes Che Guevara’s powerful <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Che_Guevara_On_Socialism_and_Internationalism_EN.pdf">sentiment</a>
that ‘a true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love’, which
forms the bedrock of Freire’s approach. ‘The revolution loves and
creates life’, Freire wrote, ‘and in order to create life it may be
obliged to prevent some men from circumscribing life’. This was not
‘love’ in the abstract but love in a very concrete way. In Brazil,
Freire wrote, there were ‘living corpses’ or ‘shadows of human beings’
who faced an ‘invisible war’ of hunger and disease, illiteracy and
indignity; their liberation from the structural domination of capitalism
would require the defeat of the actual people who benefitted from the
system which deprived the oppressed of basic needs. The rising of the
oppressed — in other words, the Revolution — was going to improve the
life of the vast majority, but it would necessarily negatively impact
the lives of the capitalists. There was no idealism in Freire — only the
deeply practical appreciation of study and struggle within the actual
world in which we live.</p>
<p>It is perhaps Freire’s firm grip on the actual processes of social
life that influenced generations of South African freedom fighters. Our
latest dossier, <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-34-paulo-freire-and-south-africa/"><i>Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa</i></a><i>,</i>
documents the influence of Freire’s ideas within the Black
Consciousness Movement, the church, the workers’ movement, and in the
heart of the liberation struggle. In an interview for this dossier,
Aubrey Mokoape, who founded the South African Students Organisation in
1968 along with Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, and others, told
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research how Freire’s idea of
‘conscientisation’ advanced the socialist agenda of the Black
Consciousness Movement:</p>
<p>The only way to overthrow this government is to get the mass of our
people understanding what we want to do and owning the process, in other
words, becoming conscious of their position in society, in other words …
joining the dots, understanding that if you don’t have money to pay …
for your child’s school fees, fees at medical school, you do not have
adequate housing, you have poor transport, how those things all form a
single continuum; that all those things are actually connected. They are
embedded in the system, that your position in society is not isolated
but it is systemic.</p>
<p>To live with dignity and with love would mean to transform a system
that is incapable of solving the problems it creates. Education — or
‘conscientisation’ — is precisely about the interrelated process of
study and struggle in forming a consciousness and a conscience that
demands more than moderate reforms. It was not about being given shoes
but fighting for a system where a lack of shoes cannot even be imagined.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_31613" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/L-to-R-Mongane-Wally-Serote-Nadine-Gordimer-and-Dennis-Brutus_Amazwi-South-African-Museum-of-Literature.jpg" alt="Mongane Wally Serote (second from left), Nadine Gordimer (centre), and Dennis Brutus (second from the right), courtesy of Amazwi South African Museum of Literature." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="346"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-31613" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Mongane
Wally Serote (second from left), Nadine Gordimer (centre), and Dennis
Brutus (second from the right), courtesy of Amazwi South African Museum
of Literature.</span></p></div>
<p>South Africa’s poet laureate Mongane Wally Serote underwent
‘conscientisation’ in the Black Consciousness Movement during his school
years in Soweto, before he joined the African National Congress. In
1969, Serote was arrested and spent nine months in solitary confinement.
He eventually went into exile: first to Botswana, where he joined the
uMkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the ANC, and then formed the Medu
Arts Ensemble with Thami Mnyele and others. Later, Serote would go to
London to work in the ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture. He returned
to South Africa in 1990.</p>
<p>In 1977, Serote and others formed the Pelandaba Cultural Effort in Gaborone (Botswana) and published <i>Pelculef</i>. In the first issue of the journal, published in October 1977, Serote published his poem <i>no more strangers</i>.
The rhythm of the poem is the pulse of the struggle to which Serote and
his comrades had dedicated their lives. Here’s a brief extract, the
impression of Freire’s ‘conscientisation’ imprinted in it:</p>
<blockquote><p>it were us, it is us<br>
the children of Soweto<br>
langa, kagiso, alexandra, gugulethu and nyanga<br>
us<br>
a people with a long history of resistance<br>
us<br>
who will dare the mighty<br>
for it is freedom, only freedom which can quench our thirst —<br>
we did learn from terror that it is us who will seize history<br>
our freedom.<br>
…<br>
remember the shattering despair to feel as worthless as debris<br>
remember the shades of death we longed for<br>
here we are now<br>
…<br>
it will be us<br>
steel-taut to fetch freedom<br>
and —<br>
we will tell freedom<br>
we are no more strangers now.</p></blockquote>
<div id="gmail-attachment_31663" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Cover-of-Tsetlo-by-Mongane-Wally-Serote-by-Thami-Mnyele-1974.jpg" alt="Cover by Thami Mnyele for Tsetlo by Mongane Wally Serote, 1974." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="346"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-31663" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Cover by Thami Mnyele for <i>Tsetlo</i> by Mongane Wally Serote, 1974.</span></p></div>
<p>It has to be us. We are waiting for no-one else. It can only be us.
We will make our own shoes. It will be us. We will walk with dignity. We
will prevail.</p>
<p>Warmly,</p>
<p>Vijay</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/47-2020-paulo-freire-and-south-africa/?output=pdf">Download as PDF</a> </p></div></div></div>
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